Designing Dynamic Templates

When you design a dynamic template, you want to have high confidence that the resulting variations will each be on-brand and free of visual defects.

Indivio provides a process and visual QA tool that enables you to gain this confidence by previewing exactly how your template will perform with variations of data.

Designing Dynamic Templates

We suggest following a 4-step creation process that involves
1) Planning
2) Design
3) Onboarding
4) QA.    

1. Planning

Planning your dynamic design starts with the feed that will be used to drive variations

• Relevance: More of a creative question, but ask yourself how the design can be made delightfully relevant and if the right columns in the feed are present.  In the context of products, these might be product photos, sales pricing, testimonials, and starred reviews.  In the context of markets, these might be locations and location-specific messaging.
  
  
• Columns: Pay special attention to which columns will be used to drive variations in the design.  These will be either texts, links to image, video, or audio clips, or color codes.  Make your dynamic layer names consistent with the feed column name in order to streamline workflows.
  
  
• Variability: Pay special attention to the variability of text and media inputs.  For text, plan to design for both the min and max text length you want to display.  For images and video, make sure your design can handle a variety of sizes.  We strongly recommend creating a “validation feed” with rows of sample data that cover the minimum and maximum variations in text lengths and asset sizes.  You will use this to QA.
  
  
• Conditional: Identify if any visual elements should be on for one audience and not for another - e.g. showing a sales tag on a sale item but not on a regular item. Consider also designing for elements that should appear in the future - e.g. activating a holiday theme or message on a specific date.

2. Design

Beyond the content itself, the challenges with designing for dynamic creative stem from how variations of texts, images, and videos are handled.  Design problems can results from:

1. Variable lengths and sizes
2. Alignment of elements
3. Turning elements on and off

Refer to the “validation feed” with the sample rows of data that you created during planning to confirm whether your design will handle the variations.

Enabling Dynamic Text, Images, and Video

• Enable text element for dynamic
• Enable image / video element for dynamic

Variable Lengths / Sizes

• Text Sizing
• Automatically scaling assets
• Changing the size of dependent design elements
• Changing the position [x,y] of design elements dynamically

See Working with Conditional Elements.

Use the Template Design Checklist to make sure your design is ready for the next step: onboard.

3. Onboard 

After reviewing the Template Design Checklist, you need to prepare your template for onboarding.  This involves saving your project files in the right versions, collecting dependencies, and compressing the files into a zip archive.

Resources: 

• Template Design Checklist
  
  
• Preparing Template Project for Onboarding
   
• Create Template
   

Next, if you haven’t done so already, take the “validation feed” with sample data and create a feed on Indivio to be used with the template for QA.

• Create Feed - CSV

Once you have a template onboarded successfully and a feed created, you are ready to QA the template design.

4. QA

The QA step involves rendering variations of static and video media using the onboarded template and the validation feed.  Indivio will render variations for real-time preview, so you can quickly see many different versions and identify any issues with the design.  Use Thumbnail view to scale up the thumbnails and make it easier to review.

• Create Media (Images and Videos) From Feed
• Change the size of thumbnail previews

 
Sample QA screen:

If issues are identified with the template, adjustments can be made to the design and the template can be updated for further testing.

• Update Template